Tag Archives: Change

But Will Elections Change Anything? By Jeffrey A. Tucker

Posted on October 22, 2022 | 1 comment

We all know the answer, even those of us who aren’t full-time cynics. From Jeffrey A. Tucker at brownstone.org:

It’s coming up in a fortnight. For many people, all their hopes rest on the outcome. I get it because these seem like very dark times. We cannot live without hope. But we also need realism. The problems are deep, pervasive, scandalously entrenched.

Many people won financially and in terms of power from lockdowns and have no intention either to apologize or give up their gains. What’s more, for that to have happened to this great country – and many great counties – indicates something far more pernicious than a policy error or an ideological mistake.

The fix is going to require vast change. Tragically, the elected politicians may be the least likely to push for such a change. This is due to what we call the “Deep State” but there ought to be another name. It is rather obvious now that we are dealing with a beast that includes media, technology, nonprofits, and multinational and international government agencies and all the groups they represent.

That said, let’s deal here with the most obvious problem: the administrative state.

The plot of every episode of Yes, Minister – a British sitcom that aired in the early 1980s – is pretty much the same. The appointed Minister of the Department of Administrative Affairs waltzes in with a grand and idealistic statement left over from his political campaigns. The permanent secretary who serves him responds affirmatively and then cautions that there might be other considerations to take into account.

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Posted in Government, Politics

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The Manufacture of Decline, by Patrick Lawrence

Posted on November 2, 2021 | 2 comments

Ignoring or suppressing the truth ultimately works against those who do it. The same is true of nations and their governments. From Patrick Lawrence at consortiumnews.com:

Americans suffer the same disabilities as the Europeans of 1919: They cannot think. They cannot speak plainly among themselves. 

“Din and Cocktails,” west side of Detroit, 2014. (ddatch54, Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

We modern civilizations have learned to recognize that we are mortal like the others. We had heard tell of whole worlds vanished, of empires foundered … sunk to the inexplorable depths of the centuries with their gods and laws, their academies and their pure and applied sciences, their grammars, dictionaries, classics … their critics and the critics of their critics…. We could not count them. But these wrecks, after all, were of no concern of ours.”

That is Paul Valéry, the modernist poet, essayist and Academician, writing in April 1919. The Great War was but a few months over. Europe understood, if subliminally at that moment, that the world order of which it had been the center had shattered like glass. Or — better put — that Europe had shattered it.

“Everything came to Europe, and from Europe everything has come. Or almost everything,” Valéry wrote. “Now, the present situation permits of this capital question: Will Europe retain its leadership in all activities? Will Europe become what she is in reality: that is, a little cape of the Asiatic continent?” [Emphasis the author’s.]

Valéry was less interested in Europe’s wrecked landscapes and its blown-to-bits economy than he was in what had happened to European minds and spirits — how people thought and felt. Europe’s best brains had just wasted themselves “finding a way to remove barbed wire, baffle the submarines, or paralyze the flight of aeroplanes.”

Then, the war over, Europe no longer knew how to think. Europeans could not speak among themselves of their abruptly arrived new circumstances. People retreated into the classics of European culture and took to repeating the old verities as to the Continent’s ancient greatness. Valéry called the essay I quote “The Intellectual Crisis.” Its topic was “the disorder of our mental Europe.”

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Posted in Foreign Policy, Governments, History, Military, Morality, Politics, Psychology

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No Change on the Way to No Cash, by Eric Peters

Posted on July 17, 2020 | 1 comment

Phasing out change may be the first step towards phasing out cash…and what remains of our financial freedom. From Eric Peters at ericpetersautos.com:

When people are terrified, it is hard for them to think – which probably explains why they seem unable to now. Can it possibly be a coincidence that as the number of “cases” endlessly reported is increasing, the amount of changeavailable at stores is all of a sudden decreasing?

Could the two be  . . . connected somehow?

Is it credible that – all of a sudden and right now – there’s no change in the till, just by chance? When such shortages have never happened before?

Do you suppose it is possible this purported “shortage” of coins is contrived – to push people toward not using cash?

It’s a thought you’d think more people would have. One that might raise some questions in their minds.

But then, they don’t seem to think very much about the “cases,” either.

Instead, they are scared – terrified. And – not surprisingly – passive. Terror, psychologists will tell you, induces torpor. It frazzles the cognitive apparatus. There is a reason why rabbits freeze when confronted with a predator.

Americans, lots of them, have become lagomorphic. They freeze – paralyzed by the fear instilled by the predator. They are shocked into submission (the Soviets styled their front-line troops shock troops for a reason; it is not a coincidence that the applicators of state terrorism under the Great Decider also used the term, shock and awe – as a paralytic agent).

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Posted in Banking, Currencies, Governments, Money

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